Communities wooing biotech firms

Lisa Eckelbecker TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

Published Friday June 6, 2008 at 6:00 am

Cities and towns hoping to get in on life sciences development need to have sites ready to go when companies call and municipal officials who can respond with speed, development experts said yesterday.

The entities that search for locations for businesses may spend months doing research, then give communities just five days to answer detailed written requests for information, said John DiNapoli, director of business services for the Massachusetts Alliance for Economic Development.

“When these folks call, we need somebody who can answer the phone at the municipality and give us the information,” Mr. DiNapoli said.

Preparing municipalities for life sciences development is the subject of a Massachusetts Biotechnology Council initiative. The MBC, a trade group for the state’s biotech companies, brought the discussion to Worcester yesterday after holding similar sessions in Andover, Billerica and Chicopee. The effort comes as the state is considering a $1 billion investment to encourage life sciences economic development.

Peter Abair, MBC director for economic development, said biotechnology is a statewide industry, with 70 percent of the state’s biotech companies located outside Boston and Cambridge. To compete in a global marketplace, Massachusetts cities and towns need to be ready with information on properties that could be developed, and information on their communities’ water, sewer and electricity capacities.

“Other countries, other parts of the world, are making huge investments in biotech, so we have to be cognizant of that,” Mr. Abair said.

Being ready, however, takes work. Donald A. Lowe, the director of the Clinton community and economic development office who attended yesterday’s session, said Clinton residents will consider at a town meeting this month whether to create a biotech overlay zoning district and whether to participate in a state program known as “43D” that offers development grants to communities that designate development sites and rapidly consider permit requests.

Clinton officials have identified a former industrial site ready for development and hope to attract small life-science operations that might want to be close to the Worcester and Devens life-science businesses, Mr. Lowe said.

“We want to position ourselves, I think, as incubator space, and then if it grows from that, that’s great,” Mr. Lowe said.

Infrastructure can trip up a community, too. Upton sits on Interstate 495, next to Hopkinton’s cluster of life-science businesses, yet the town lacks an extensive municipal water and sewer system, and its underground water resources could be costly to tap, said former selectwoman Marsha A. Paul, who also attended yesterday’s session.

The state’s development program might be helpful in tapping that water and putting positive developments on land already identified for industrial use, she said.